Node.js is a relatively new server platform that is built on JavaScript. One of the main features of Node is that it is a non-blocking server. This means that resource-intensive tasks will not tie up the server. Node.js can then handle many concurrent connections. It can also handle real-time communications more easily than a blocking server.
One of the main uses of Node.js is as a web server. This is a perfect task as serving web pages usually involves reading files and connecting to a database. It is able to serve more clients while either of these two actions are executing. This is very different compared to a blocking server. A blocking server would have to wait for all the resources to return before it could respond to more requests.
Note
Note that this reference will only be Node.js specific; we will not cover any frameworks or libraries in this chapter.
The most popular frameworks are useful and should be utilized whenever possible, but our...